Saturday, August 24, 2013

Prozac Nation

Started watching Prozac Nation. You get to see Christina Ricci naked, but it's about an especially vile Harvard girl. According to Wikipedia, the author of the memoir it's based on was fired from a newspaper for plagiarism, publicly claimed to be a lawyer before she had ever been licensed to practice law anywhere, used heroin, and claims that any sympathy for Palestinians in Gaza was based entirely on "anti-Semitism". She wrote an article attacking her parents for a teen magazine in which she falsely claimed to have reconciled with her father. The book was a memoir by someone who never did anything but write a memoir---a Harvard girl telling us how extra special she is at the same time thinking her problems are of universal interest.

You can do that sort of thing on a local level. There's a guy who lived just a couple of blocks from me who wrote a memoir about his "shocking" childhood with his rich mother and his father who was a dentist or some such thing.

I was slightly acquainted with the guy's mother who was a friend of one of the owners of a business where I worked. She was kind of obnoxious. She thought it was funny to talk in a Zsa Zsa Gabor accent. Turns out she's an "artist".

It was amusing to hear about the book, but I have no interest in reading it.

The author, I think, is a teacher now and I hear he regrets having written the book. He brags about playing with a shotgun when he was 14, hinting that he was suicidal. His mother was disgusting. The cover of the book has a picture of her teaching him to smoke cigarettes when he was about nine.